Port Authority Bus Terminal, beset by delays and decrepitude, set for $260M overhaul

Commuters say late departures from the bus terminal are common. So are leaky ceilings and poor air conditioning.

Richard Simon keeps a tally of every injustice inflicted upon him by the Port Authority Bus Terminal. At 5:02 p.m., Bus 77 left for Toms River. Simon recorded its departure on a small notepad using a scratchy blue pen.

Further insults occurred at 5:03, when buses departed for Freehold and Morristown and another for Toms River, leaving Simon behind on the platform waiting for his own bus, the 196, scheduled to depart at 5 p.m. for West Milford. After a lull, four buses left at 5:11, which Simon found especially galling.

Long lines in unwelcome conditions are a way of life inside the Port Authority Bus Terminal in New York, daily commuters say.

“It just kills me,” said Simon, 66, shaking with anger. “They’re charging us top-dollar fares and giving us Third World service.”

Simon isn’t the only person who’s angry. Conditions at the Port Authority Bus Terminal are worse than ever, said Mark Schaff, the man in charge of the facility. Long lines are growing longer. Critical pathways for buses and pedestrians are clogged, deteriorated and dangerous. The heating and cooling systems are inadequate, the bathrooms are horrors, and the ceiling leaks rain and melted snow onto commuters’ heads.

After decades of deferred overhauls, however, a rare alignment of commuter outrage and shifting politics may force the building’s owner, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, to make repairs. The agency plans to spend up to $260 million on maintenance in the coming years, a small down payment on what commuters, some elected officials and the agency’s leaders agree is truly needed: an all-new terminal that could cost more than $1 billion.

A new building is years — possibly decades — away. Meanwhile, New Jersey commuters, who make up the largest contingent of riders that use the complex, must cope the best they can.

“It’s in very bad physical shape, and it’s totally unacceptable,” said Scott Rechler, a Port Authority commissioner from New York. “We can put lipstick on a pig to make things a little more manageable. But it won’t solve the larger problem, which is the need for a new bus terminal.”

Rechler and the rest of the agency’s board of commissioners, however, approved a 10-year capital plan in February without a bus terminal replacement project.

Congestion has grown markedly worse in recent years, said Schaff, the Port Authority’s assistant general manager in charge of the terminal and the Lincoln Tunnel. It’s so bad that bus drivers routinely try to hide their vehicles inside the terminal by circling its byzantine pathways to stay off city streets, where police are quick to write tickets. The impact on commuters’ lives is direct, and at times, intensely personal. Monica Rose has missed most of her son’s football games at Teaneck High School because of late buses, she said. She had a doctor’s appointment at 6 p.m. Thursday, so she arrived at the bus terminal at 4:47 p.m.

Standing in line, it appeared she’d miss that appointment, too.

“It could be 30 minutes, it could be an hour,” Rose said. “It makes it impossible to plan anything after work.”

Every month, Abby Chieffalo’s mother-in-law visits her apartment in Edgewater to cook a big Italian dinner. Most months, Chieffalo is late. Chieffalo blames her tardiness on bus terminal delays, but her mother-in-law takes it as an insult.

“We are treated like cattle! This just can’t continue. It’s a form of torture,” said Amy Losack, a Teaneck resident waiting for the 167 bus. “I sit for eight hours a day, and I want to go home and go for a walk outside. But I can’t. This is a pit! This is a horror show!”

Growing ridership

The simplest reason for growing congestion at the bus terminal is the fact that more people are using it every day. An average of 113,234 NJ Transit bus passengers used the terminal daily in 2003, according to NJ Transit. By 2013 that number had increased to 156,028 daily travelers, not including the people who take buses belonging to smaller, private companies or long-haul buses such as Greyhound.

Bus counts rose accordingly, from 938 NJ Transit coaches using the terminal every rush hour in 2002 to 1,048 in 2013.

Ridership increases were the result of historic demographic shifts, including rising population along New Jersey’s Hudson riverfront and a large number of riders who shifted permanently from trains to buses after Superstorm Sandy in 2012, said Schaff and NJ Transit spokeswoman Nancy Snyder.

Meanwhile, the capacity of the terminal and Manhattan’s West Side to handle buses actually shrank. Over the past decade, NJ Transit lost a number of bus parking lots on the West Side to residential developments; traffic in the area grew more congested; and the New York Police Department assigned traffic cops to the neighborhood to prevent buses from parking illegally, Snyder said.

“All of these factors are contributing to lines and congestion,” she said.

The terminal, part of which dates to 1950, is already past its functional life, Schaff said. The system failures start at the entrance to the ramps leading to the terminal. With so many buses trying to get from the Lincoln Tunnel to the ramps, some are diverted onto city streets to prevent dangerous gridlock in the tunnel, Schaff said.

“I’ve been here 25 years, and we’ve always diverted,” Schaff said. “But now we’re diverting earlier” in the day.

The second choke point occurs on the ramps, which divide halfway up, sending most buses to the third floor and some to the fourth. The problem: Buses bound for the lower floor block those trying to merge onto the top ramp.

“All the buses get in each others’ way. If you get pushed into the wrong spot, you’re finished,” said NJ Transit bus driver Paul Venezia, who drives route 196.